For those of us who live outside the Overton Window, political discourse in this country is nonsense, a running joke for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It’s the sheer boredom of hearing the same stupid ideas repeated over and over that keeps me from paying attention to TV and Cable news. At least with the internet and the newspaper you can skip through the blather quickly looking for a spark of creativity or insight, and pick up any new factual information you might find interesting or useful.

And it isn’t like we have any sign of intelligent life in our corporate sector, either. The best minds of a generation are devoting themselves to figuring out the perfect snack food: addictive empty calories, and who cares if diabetes is rampant. Or dreaming up the next investment bubble. Student loan ABS? You betcha. You can still find insight and inquiry in science and some parts of academia, but by Gog and Magog, that won’t include economics, a land inhabited by Zombie ideas and lies, lorded over by failures standing on the wreckage they’ve created and screaming that it proves they were right all along.

An article in this month’s Scientific American discusses the emergence of creativity in humans. It places the big leap about 100,000 years ago, when two elements converged. First, the size of the brain had increased dramatically, and people began to harness that size. Second, the number of people living in close quarters increased to a sustainable level. The first part comes from studies of creative people showing that when confronted by a problem, they free-associate the issues they see, looking for related ideas and memories. As they settle in on a possible solution, they switch to a more analytic form of thinking. Liane Gabora, a cognitive scientist at the University of British Columbia, speculates that this transition becomes more natural with use and practice, and has done experiments to show how it might work.

The second comes from living in a large enough group that new ideas are more likely. Your own group may not be big enough, but if you run across a group with a new technology, you can learn it easily, and teach it to members of your group and other groups.

But why would you try new ideas? Don’t you suppose that there were plenty of our ancestors saying that the old way of knapping stones was fine for their parents so it’s great for you and your children? They were the people cowering in the corner of the Abri when the lightening flashed, while the daring sat at the edge enjoying the light show. I think one reason is that it’s fun to think up new stuff. It gives you a little thrill to learn something new, to master some new skill, to see a something new in an art gallery or to hear a cool new piece of music. Well, that was fun, but it’s just speculation.

What’s real is that you could listen to the political class forever without hearing anything that would make a difference to the average American. For a real blast of that kind of stupid, take a look at this from some @FixTheDebt guy in The Hill. The Republicans have been arguing the same thing for 30 years: cut taxes and cut government. It never changes. Ever. Evidence of failure, completely new circumstances, nothing changes. From the Scientific American article:

Chimpanzees are highly adept at using a wide range of tools – cracking open nuts with stones, sponging up water from tree hollows with leaves and unearthing nutritious plant roots with digging sticks. But they seem unable to build on this knowledge or to craft ever more advanced technology. “Chimps can show other chimps how to hunt termites,” [archaeologist Christopher] Henshilwood says, “ but they don’t improve on it, they don’t say ‘let’s do it with a different kind of probe’ – they just do the same thing over and over”.

On the other side of the aisle, there is little sign of life. Democrats might or might not see the utter failure of the policies they supported, but they don’t have the stomach to change anything. They don’t lead. They don’t pick up new ideas and try to teach them to people. They don’t listen to the people who got it right, but to a slightly different crowd of rich people who also want government to hammer the middle class and give the proceeds to them. Chicken Chimps.

Meanwhile, in the world outside this tiny window of acceptable discourse, there are new ideas and new ways forward. They don’t get any discussion except in the blog world or among friends or in tiny academic circles, or, of course, in Europe, where even economics is getting a blast of new ideas. See this and this and this and this.

The great value of democracy could be that we can use all of our people to get the spark of creativity going, to try new things and get results that benefit all of us. But that doesn’t happen. The same stupid ideas hang around long after their grotesque failure ruins millions of lives. And the only ones who benefit are the dull and brutal hyper-rich, the Alpha-Chimps.

Masaccio is being unfair to organisms in the financial world. They are constantly inventing new things to enrich themselves, such as credit-default swaps and other derivatives. These may be ultimately destructive to many people, like gunpowder and nuclear weapons, but that’s technological progress. Anyway, derivatives have not really been harmful yet to those who made the most use of them.

Are these financial organisms a new species which will replace humans because of their greater ingenuity? Or are some branches of humans, such as Democratic politicians and the media, just degenerate and slated for weeding out?

Not only are the same stupid ideas repeated over and over again, we get them from the same people. The roster of idiot newspaper columnists and TV news readers etc. is full of the same a**holes who were around a generation ago.

Thank you so much for this. I stopped watching cable and broadcast television, except for baseball & the occasional thrilling Tiger Woods golf performance, but I started to feel like I was in a tiny, useless minority. Maybe I am evolving so I can sharpen my chances of surviving against the Alpha Chimps.

Not fitting into the normal damages a soul. It is tiring to push back constantly. Being creative is viewed by the MOTU as being threatening, undeserving and undisciplined. Even scientists are looked upon as sketchy. The psychopaths that run the planet project their own personality defects onto all they encounter. So, if you have ever painted a picture, written a book, discovered a cure but you are not rich then you are considered useless and a threat at the same time. Power is all. People are nothing but to be used and abused.

One thing that we see in Europe is the rise and fall of new parties. These give voters a way to force new ideas into the system. Here’s a discussion of Ukip, a relatively new party in England, in The Guardian. We don’t have a way to force the elites to deal with new ideas now that the two parties are locked in an infernal embrace with the austerians and the feral rich.

From the link to the Hill article by Fertig. He’s the CEO of Reputation and one of the cosponsors of Fix-The-Debt. He comes across as snotty. He Seems to be mocking the 99% by using it in his title and by saying throughout his piece that the !% has all of the money and now all of the power and all of the time in the world to wait the 99% out.

What an error in judgement. How arrogant for him to demand further cuts in a Grand Bargain. How does he expect his victims to feel towards him when he has taken from their social insurance programs, and cut their jobs, and after his 1% group is done buying up foreclosed houses the 99% used to own? Have they learned nothing from the Occupy movement?

Fertig’s arrogance and tone deafness and perhaps even his superiority attitude confirm my suspicion that the 1% hates the 99%. Monbiot thinks that the elite simply live in a different universe and have different values, but I disagree with him on their attitudes toward the rest of us.

We need to use the fact that they are really one party for the one percenters to our advantage. I have no idea how to do this. I thought being informed was key to reform. But now I have a head full of information that just swills around and I am starting to be less nuanced and more dogmatic. I have a really hard time not personalizing this.

Anybody who thinks we are just a bunch of idealist hippies has no idea what we are accomplishing over here by the Lake. We have defeated several relentless campaigns by the plutocrats to steal our Social Security money, on which they have expended hundreds of millions of dollars. We have had repeated success, for at least eight years (since Shrub’s first privatization maneuvers).

And yet, with just a few dollars from each of us, we can run virtual campaigns like this one to defeat Catfood version 2.0, despite the plutocrats’ payoffs to the politicians. Because the politicians know that money doesn’t vote, voters vote.

I’m not sure what you had in mind about Europe but they have a whole lot of grief there now. If they don’t figure it out soon they will get the chance to just start over. The whole thing is being forced on them.

Democracy and oligarchy are always engaged in a battle over the central question of any political policy choice — Qui bono, who benefits?

It’s a battlefield of ideas & ideals, few shots fired, billions of minds molded to a single purpose of perpetuating the political power grid. An independent thinker, anyone whose ideas are not aligned with this goal, must be assimilated or destroyed.

So after taking an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, a person discovers evidence of direct violations of the same, is compelled to take this information public to hold the perpetraitors accountable, he or she faces arrest, trial, conviction and imprisonment for aiding and abetting the enemy, but only if they’re lucky. If not, trial & conviction are droned out by expediency when the person’s continued freedom represents too large a threat to the system.

I think you can argue that the whole idea of compromise and Obamas bi partisan grand bargain is at the root of a lot of this. We have to learn to say No! and be sure other democrats say the same thing,or become history.

On the other side of the aisle, there is little sign of life. Democrats might or might not see the utter failure of the policies they supported, but they don’t have the stomach to change anything. They don’t lead. They don’t pick up new ideas and try to teach them to people. They don’t listen to the people who got it right, but to a slightly different crowd of rich people who also want government to hammer the middle class and give the proceeds to them. Chicken Chimps.

Masaccio the key point you miss is that from the perspective of the Democratic establishment these policies are NOT failures – they did what they were supposed to do, which is transfer wealth and power to the 1% at the expense of everyone else. In case it needs to be said, the Democratic establishment is as much a part of that 1% as their Republican counterparts. The interests of the elite transcends party lines, and it is those interests that determine public policy.

The only difference is that the Democrats need to make a show of being reluctant plutocrats for the sake of their base.

There MAY be a difference between the two parties in that the Republican top leadership represents an even slimmer percentage of the extreme elite–say, the top 0.01% as opposed to the Democrats 0.1%.

As for how the uniparty will be broken, this is my prediction: an absolutely catastrophic defeat for the Democrats in the 2014 off-year elections which will make it impossible for the leaders of the party to even pretend that they are representing their base. Simultaneously, the enormous increase in Republican representation in Congress will bring to the forefront the split between the Tea Party and business/establishment wings of that party.

The Democrats’ defeat will be the result of the economy’s falling into a new round of severe depression thanks to an austerity program (similar to what happened to the country in 1937 under Franklin Roosevelt) bringing about cries even from the upper middle class to “do something.” Also, by this time it will be apparent to all that the Afghan war was a costly failure, tarnishing irreparably any credibility of the military/security state that has arisen since 9/11. The synergy of all these events will be too much for the uniparty, corporatist state to withstand.

I’ve been sort of thinking that our punditocracy sees the problems facing the repubs, but ignores the problems facing the dems. If these clowns follow Obama off the Grand Bargain cliff, why would anyone vote for them? It might be the end of politics as currently practiced. Alan Grayson predicts real trouble if they do, as my friend Gaius Publius shows here.

Obama wants his worker bee supporters to work with OFA, and then he raises money from giant donors for that group. It’s like he wants some kind of Tea Party to call his own. I don’t think there are any progressives in that group, and darned few liberals. It’ll be party tribe people, and they will be astonished when they realize they cut their grandmother’s Social Security.

I tend to agree that it is going to take a genuine catastrophe to break the two party power duopoly, and I think that a catastrophe on that scale is coming. Our elites have made such a dog’s breakfast out of managing the economy, climate change, social justice and any number of other things that it’s probably only a matter of time. The collapse of the dot com bubble in 2000 and the real estate / derivatives bubble in 2008 were -or rather should have been- the early warning indicators that there was something seriously wrong with the state of financial capitalism. But as to when it might happen – well, if I could see the future I’d be in a different line of work.

And when it does happen there is no guarantee that what comes after is going to be an improvement. If there is mass mobilization against entrenched interests then there will be mass repression as the 1% resort to any means necessary to defend their position.

The original post. This blog decided to support Obama by omission in 2012 knowing full well he was going to sell us out on social security but they did it anyway. Now it is complaining that they are ignored when they were ignored before.

You can still find insight and inquiry in science and some parts of academia, but by Gog and Magog, that won’t include economics, a land inhabited by Zombie ideas and lies, lorded over by failures standing on the wreckage they’ve created and screaming that it proves they were right all along.

Huh? Econ isn’t a problem unique from other aspects of science/academia – it’s a symptom of the exact same problem, an utter failure of leadership across our institutions.

There are plenty of good ideas in economics, just like there are in civil engineering and medicine and accounting and poetry and law. The problem is a culture of leadership that values corruption and bribery over reality and evidence.

Meanwhile, in the world outside this tiny window of acceptable discourse, there are new ideas and new ways forward. They don’t get any discussion except in the blog world or among friends or in tiny academic circles, or, of course, in Europe, where even economics is getting a blast of new ideas.

Your idea of new ideas is the econ/finance reaction of banking interests over the past five years in Europe? Seriously?

I didn’t support any of the candidates, if that matters. None of them asked me for help, other than money, and that wasn’t going to happen.

As to economics, I didn’t say there weren’t ideas. I’m fully aware of some of them, and ready to learn about more. That isn’t at all the point of this post. The point is that there have not been any new ideas put to work to deal with this financial crisis; the few ideas we had from the past that might have worked weren’t given a fair shot because of politics; and the current debate is the same one we’ve been having since St. Reagan and his band of crooks.

If you look carefully at the posts identified as this, this, this and this, you will see that they match up pretty well with MMT. Those ideas are getting full exposure in European policy circles, even as they are totally ignored by politicians, especially Merkel and Cameron. There are exactly zero Americans in policy-making positions who would dare even to talk about those ideas. Our debates look like Andrew Jackson and the central bank.

That is precisely the fault of academic economists, who have raised generations of college kids on ideology and ideas that were doomed to fail, as I have been saying since the deregulation of the financial sector got underway under St Reagan. I saw it first hand as the Securities Commissioner of Tennessee, and write about it from time to time.

As to failures of institutions, let me just say that I have kin who work in basic research. The failures are failures of government and corporate leadership, not of those scientists and their friends. I did bankruptcy work for 25 years, and I never saw a business that failed because of its workers. All failures were failures of management.

I really appreciate the response, but I don’t follow its connection to the series of articles I’ve been reading. Sorry, I guess I’m just dense on this. You seem to acknowledge on the one hand that we’re experiencing management failures, yet then on the other, you set about blaming the workers.

This forum probably isn’t the best for a detailed response, but in broad strokes, here are my key contentions in response to your series:

1. There is no substantive difference between the US and European responses; the very notion that the western bailout model can even be segregated by the major nations strikes me as odd. Both groups would be better off by prosecuting criminals and putting failed firms through bankruptcy. Both groups chose, instead, to ignore (certain) unlawful activity and bail out (certain) failed companies.

2. There are lots of ideas in economics, both generally and specifically in regard to the frauds and mismanagement of the most recent crisis. The problem is not ideas or indoctrination or public opinion or anything about the substance of issues. America generally, and young people in particular, are the most leftist/progressive/multicultural/whatever perhaps ever in American history. Rather, political economy is confronted by an entirely different set of problems related to corruption and bribery and the general failure of leadership in out nation’s institutions.

Economists haven’t educated a generation of corporatists – if anything, they’ve educated a generation of socialists. Economists haven’t ignored the financial crisis – if anything, many economic warnings have been ignored.

3. MMT is very valuable in observing that a sovereign nation cannot be forced by outside creditors to explicitly default on its own currency-denominated debt. However, in no way does that mean that spending is definitionally good. Nor does it mean that spending cuts are definitionally bad. Rather, what matters is how the money is spent. The technical details of monetary policy simply are irrelevant because the problems are not about finding technical solutions – they are about putting leaders in place who actually want to solve problems.

Quite simply, I would argue, there is not a single dollar that the US government has wanted to spend that the US government has not been able to spend. The fundamental problem in political economy is that the government is run by people who want to allocate resources for purposes other than promoting the public good. Economists and public opinion simply aren’t barriers to good public policy.

We clearly don’t see this the same way. I read widely in business and finance, and I do not see anyone arguing anything that looks remotely socialist. The spread of argument is from Orszag to the right.

The insight of MMT is that there is no particular reason to issue debt to create money for the government to spend. See Chapter 7 of Wray’s book for a detailed explanation. Or, check out diaries from letsgetitdone on MyFDL for a series of posts on the rationale for the Trillion Dollar Coin.

Bill Black has no standing in the economic community or in the regulatory community. These are controlled by corporate interests and take guidance from the same stupid ideas that got us into this situation.

There is a substantive difference between European and US responses, as I noted. The US started better, and now in the face of the failure of austerity and the disaster of 1937 wants to follow in their tracks. My point is that Lord Adair Turner and the economists at the BIS are talking about these problems and alternative solutions. The US isn’t.

Eh, I basically don’t understand the claim that corporatist/neolib/whatever framing is the only legitimate source of discourse. To me, that accepts the very framing that is the problem – that other ideas are Not Serious (or don’t exist at all). TINA in all its glory.

It’s a bit like analyzing American culture solely by watching MTV or analyzing baseball solely by watching the YES network or analyzing public opinion on drug policy by only talking to people over 70 – it’s not wrong per se; it’s just so incomplete as to miss the bigger picture.

***

Longer response, if you’re interested:

Just off the top of my head: People like Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich weren’t fringe wackos; they were in the Clinton Administration. You don’t have to go dumpster diving to find books by Dean Baker or James K. Galbraith; you can buy them on Amazon. Websites run by people like Yves Smith or Michael Hudson don’t require sophisticated gopher or FTP access; they are perfectly accessible to a nontechnical audience. I mean, the former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City laid out a case against Too Big to Fail and the former Chief Economist of the freakin’ IMF wrote a piece called The Quiet Coup. How much more ‘mainstream’ do ideas have to get?

Heck, even among the conservative voices, on many specific issues they’re in opposition to the corporatist message. For example, Milton Friedman was an early and vocal opponent of the drug war, one of the worst policies in our nation’s modern history. And I personally enjoyed much of Gregory Mankiw’s intro econ textbook – taught by a research economist at the Federal Reserve, no less. That’s about as Establishment as it gets.

Saying that people are not advocating a wider variety of opinions is like blaming bridge collapses on civil engineers. It makes no sense to me. The problem is a system that puts a type of person in power who is prone to support the interests of a small minority at the expense of the public good, not a dearth of technical knowledge or opposition from public opinion.

I want to separate specific commentary on the substantive points, because I don’t think you realize this, but they don’t help your case with me personally. I oppose a lot of the specific ideas that have come out, like the job guarantee and high value platinum coins, and I’ve been a tad disappointed that letsgetitdone hasn’t really responded to alternative perspectives.

For example, I think universal unemployment insurance is a much more efficient and equitable system than JG, which sounds good on paper where everything is run by highly skilled benevolent dictators executing flawlessly with no planning or oversight costs, but would quickly disintegrate in the Real World where these things take time, energy, focus, training, and generally ongoing management.

I read widely in business and finance, and I do not see anyone arguing anything that looks remotely socialist.

This is wrong on two fronts. One, corporate bailouts are essentially the definition of socialism – the state allocating resources better than non-state actors. This was pushed by the Establishment. Two, I’m not talking about the business and finance press. I’m talking about public opinion, where about as many young people identify as socialists as identify as capitalists. Or where the vast majority of Americans believe that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have access to healthcare. Or where the vast majority of Americans prefer a more equal distribution of wealth than currently exists in our society. Etc.

The insight of MMT is that there is no particular reason to issue debt to create money for the government to spend.

I’m not sure how that’s an insight of MMT? I mean, money printing is a pretty broadly known phrase. Moroever, no one seems to care about the government’s ability to spend other than MMTers. Neither George Bush nor Barack Obama have submitted balanced budgets. The public routinely places other issues as more important than a balanced budget. Budget blather in DC is kabuki theater, not policy advocacy.

letsgetitdone on MyFDL for a series of posts on the rationale for the Trillion Dollar Coin

Good Lord, why can’t people acknowledge that high value platinum coins are a gimmick – perfectly legal, and would work just fine, but a gimmick nonetheless? The technical workings of monetary policy are not the problem. The problem is that the people in DC want to spend money differently than the public wants them to spend money. A $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 coin wouldn’t change that.

The spending that matters is 1. short-term: getting money into the hands of people whose marginal propensity to consume is high, and 2. long-term: re-investing in our infrastructure (transit, education, sewer, wind, solar, etc.). If the IRS increased the standard deduction to $20,000 per filer, that would be an effective use of money printing. If DHS buys pornoscanners and bullets, that would be an ineffective use of money printing.

Bill Black has no standing in the economic community or in the regulatory community.

What does standing amongst the thieves have to do with anything? The way we handled the S&L disaster shows we know the basic solution – prosecute the criminals. The fact that those in power today won’t do that is a testament to the fact that we have the wrong people in power, not that we don’t know what to do.

These are controlled by corporate interests and take guidance from the same stupid ideas that got us into this situation.

It’s statements like this that confuse me, because you seem to agree that it’s a management problem, not a technical problem. But then you suggest that technical tweaks somehow solve the problem of poor management.

There is a substantive difference between European and US responses, as I noted. The US started better, and now in the face of the failure of austerity and the disaster of 1937 wants to follow in their tracks. My point is that Lord Adair Turner and the economists at the BIS are talking about these problems and alternative solutions. The US isn’t.

And I would respond that no, there’s not. There is a difference between Iceland and the US. But the UK, France, Germany, and the US responded with such a unified policy of bank bailouts and non-prosecution that I really don’t follow how you see meaningful daylight between them. This is not about austerity vs. stimulus. This is about who gets the money.